It is quite easy to say that we are drowning in work, and most business leaders accept the fact that they're trying to do too many things, too quickly, and not getting the impact they want. At the same time, they are confronted with coaches and advisers stating the obvious that they need to do less and focus more. Unfortunately, this is not useful, merely correct.

In this talk, we will explore the underlying reasons behind too much work in process, and use those common patterns as the basis to identify a set of directional approaches that will support every company, as well as a number of tactical solutions to the specific root causes that are most commonly identified. Through applying these techniques, leaders will see common patterns and see directional corrections that will support every company, as well as a number of tactical solutions to the specific root causes that are most common. These techniques will both create immediate wins and sustainable paths to improving business impact.

When we look at culture change that works, it's the result of deliberately practicing as a leadership team, and within teams at all levels. How and what can your leadership team practice to create positive cultural change in your organization? Let's explore what research and real-world experimentation results can teach us.

Success requires extreme alignment and cohesion, and intense clarity of the intent and reasoning behind what truly matters for the organization, shared by everybody with a part to play in that success.
Failure to achieve this alignment exists in every organization we’ve encountered. The cost of poor alignment is staggering, leading to wasted efforts and duplicated work on a huge scale. The cost of forcing alignment through top-down techniques is equally wasteful, denying human potential, disempowering your workforce, and adding friction to every action performed in the enterprise. The strategies required to excel require bringing together many disparate perspectives drawn from your many functional silos and organizations, followed by well-aligned activity by hundreds or thousands of practitioners in every part of your company.

This talk addresses the core challenge head on: Senior leadership lacks the tools and approaches to effectively articulate the strategies they conceive, frequently failing to achieve clarity within their own leadership team, much less across their entire organization. We help senior leaders and their teams and influencers explore the common symptoms resulting from poor articulation, discuss the application of one OKR-based approach to creating effective strategic clarity across many silos, and explore how the resulting strategies are then deployed with alignment into typical agile implementations using the Scaled Agile Framework as an example. Groups applying these techniques have seen an immediate increase in the ability to coordinate across functions, as well as dramatically improved energy focused on the key tactics to advance the core company strategies.

Your strategy (that unfortunately no one reads or remembers) is killing agility in your business.

When no one understands or remembers your strategy, people in your organization don’t make decisions that serve that strategy. When you have too many pieces or projects to your strategy, people prioritize the pieces they like, and forget the rest. Unfortunately, we are describing most of the strategies we see, regardless of company or program size, from local startups to Fortune 50. In this session we’ll leverage a simple strategy framework to practice articulating a strategy that is memorable, succinct and provides the clarity needed to create real alignment and business success.